than any of his dramas:  he preferred the first written to the rest of Goethe’s dramas.  Schiller’s ROBBERS he found so extravagant, that he could not read it.  I spoke of the scene of the setting sun.[232] He did not know it.  He said Schiller could not live.  He thought DON CARLOS the best of his dramas; but said that the plot was inextricable.—­It was evident he knew little of Schiller’s works:  indeed, he said, he could not read them.  Buerger, he said, was a true poet, and would live; that Schiller, on the contrary, must soon be forgotten; that he gave himself up to the imitation of Shakespeare, who often was extravagant, but that Schiller was ten thousand times more so.[233]

[231] Voss, who lived from Feb. 20, 1751, to March, 1826, was author of the Luise, ’a rural epopaea of simple structure divided into three idyls, which relate the betrothment and marriage of the heroine.’  This is a pleasing and very peculiar poem, composed in hexameter verse.  ’The charm of the narrative,’ says Mr. T., ’consists in the minute description of the local domestic manners of the personages.’  The charm consists, I think, in the blending of these manners with the beauty of Nature, and the ease and suitability of the versification.  Voss’s translation of the Odyssey is praised for being so perfect an imitation of the original.  The Greek has been rendered, ’with a fidelity and imitative harmony so admirable, that it suggests to the scholar the original wording, and reflects, as from a mirror, every beauty and every blemish of the ancient poem.’  Hist.  Survey, pp. 61-68.  S. C.

[232] Act III.  Sc. 2.  The night scene, which is the 5th of Act iv, is fine too in a frantic way.  The songs it contains are very spirited.  That sung by the Robbers is worthy of a Thug; it goes beyond our notions of any European bandit, and transports us to the land of Jaggernat.  S. C.

[233] The works of Buerger, who was born on the first day of 1748, died June 8, 1794, consist of Poems (2 vols.), Macbeth altered from Shakespeare, (pronounced by Taylor,—­no good judge of Shakespeare,—­in some respects superiour to the original,) Munchauesen’s Travels; Translations; (of the six first books of the Iliad, and some others); Papers philological and political.  His fame rests chiefly on three ballads, The Wild Hunter, The Parson’s Daughter, and Lenore.  The powerful diction and admirable harmony,—­rhythm, sound, rhyme of these compositions Mr. Taylor describes as the result of laborious art; it strikes me, from the outline which he has given of Buerger’s history, that the violent feelings, the life-like expression of which constitutes their power and value, may have been partly the reflex of the poet’s own mind.  His seems to have been a life of mismanagement from youth till middle age.  Like Milton, he lost a beloved second wife by childbed in the first year of marriage:  like him, he married a third time, but without his special necessity—­blindness